Prinny's Taylor is the title of a biography of Louis Bazalgette, who was tailor to the Prince of Wales, later George IV, for 32 years. It was written by his great-great-great-great grandson, Charles Bazalgette, and is now available as a trade paperback from Amazon and other distributors.

Louis was buried in the crypt of Marylebone Church. In the 1980’s the crypt was cleared to make way for a healing centre and all of the remains were removed and re-interred in a mass grave at Brookwood Cemetery. The coffin plate shown above (I must find out how to merge the two pictures into one) was collected and put into the keeping of the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at Reading University. The hand engraving of these plates was of superb quality and was therefore of considerable interest to them.

On 5 December 1996, we went to Reading University and met with Bryony Newhouse, who had written a dissertation on the plates, and her Head of Department, Michael Twyman. They presented us with the Bazalgette coffin plates. There were ten plates altogether: four brass plates from the coffins of Louis, his wife Frances and two of their children, Augustus and Caroline, two medium-sized lead breast plates (for Frances and Caroline) and four small blacked lead foot-plates, which had been attached to the outer coffins.

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Following this blog I was contacted by the Museum of London Archaeology, who have a project to photograph all of the plates that are extant. I was pleased to arrange for them to photograph ours and look forward to seeing the much better images that they will produce, compared to my amateurish effort.